Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism

First published by Zero Books, 2015

Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

office1@jhpbooks.net

www.johnhuntpublishing.com

www.zero-books.net

For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

Text copyright: Robin James 2014

ISBN: 978 1 78279 598 8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948080

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Robin James as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Sweet Nothing

2. Resilience

3. Biopolitics

4. MRWaSP

5. Melancholy

6. Siren Songs

Chapter 1

Hearing Resilience

1. Soars, Drops, Stutters: Some features of EDM-pop

2. The Resilient Noisiness of Neoliberal Pop

Chapter 2

Into the Death

1. Death as Negation or An-Arche

2. Death as Divestment or Non-Resilience

3. Taking MIDIjunkies Into the Death

4. Bending the Circuits of Biopolitical Life

Chapter 3

Look, I Overcame!

1. Good Girls Are Resilient

2. MRWaSP Visualization

3. Watch Beyonce Overcome: ‘Video Phone" and MRWaSP Visualization

4. Q: Are We Not Human Capital? A: We Are Diva

Chapter 4

(Little) Monsters & Melancholics

1. Gaga’s Post-Goth Resilience

2. Rihanna’s Melancholic Damage

Conclusion

Alternatives & Adaptations

1. Bad Investments

2. Post-Soar Biopolitics: We Can’t Stop

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Thinking is hard and writing is even harder. I couldn’t have finished this book without the intellectual, moral, and material support of more people than I can name here.

First, some parts of this book are reworked versions of writing that was previously published elsewhere. The discussion of the soar in chapter one follows form my Loving the Alien article in The New Inquiry. Rob Horning invited me to write on Attali, and his brilliant editorial work on that piece shaped my thinking in that article and in this book. He also edited my May 2013 TNI piece on Rihanna, which was the foundation for chapter four. Chapter two is a reworked version of my December 2013 article in The Journal of Popular Music Studies Trans/Queer Special Issue; I’d like to thank both the guest editors, Tavia Noyng’o and Francesca Royster, as well as my anonymous reviewer, for their positive influence on my work.

Other parts of the book began as lectures. I delivered parts of chapters three and four as invited talks at Luther College (Holly Moore organized this talk), Rhodes College (thanks Sarah Hansen & Leigh Johnson), Colby College (at Rick Elmore’s invitation), and Wayne State (thanks Steve Shaviro). Parts of the introduction and conclusion formed my talk at philoSOPHIA 2014; I’m extremely grateful to my co-panelists Sina Kramer and Jana McAuliffe, as well as my interlocutors at the session for their feedback.

I’ve talked a lot about resilience in my feminist theory classes. I have some super smart students, and our conversations have significantly shaped my thinking in this book. Thanks to Ashley Williams, Jason Rines, Desi Self, and Chad Glenn, among others. Thanks too to Chad for his work helping to prepare this book for publication.

Almost everything in this book started out as a blog post on Its Her Factory. My readers, and those of you who talk with me on Twitter, y’all have been one of the biggest positive influences on my thinking. Musicology Twitter has been especially helpful (and fun, and generous, and one of the rare parts of academia that isn’t just not horrible, but is actually positively great.) I’m also grateful for the support of colleagues at XCPhilosophy, Cyborgology, SPEP, and in the philosophy department at UNC Charlotte. I’m also thankful for the support of similarly progressive-minded philosophers, including Tina Chanter, Emily Zakin, Elaine Miller, Bill Martin, and Darrell Moore, who taught me everything I know, as well as colleagues at the XCP Collective and at Cyborgology.

More than anyone else, my partner and sound art collaborator christian.ryan made this book possible. He listens to the first version of every single idea I have, and provides invaluable feedback. He puts up with ignored chores while I rush to meet writing deadlines. He keeps me from underselling myself and underestimating my abilities. Without his intellectual and personal support, I couldn’t do any of this.

Atari Teenage Riot lyrics are used with the kind permission of Digital Hardcore Music. I am both excited and grateful that Digital Hardcore Music recognizes the importance of fair use. It is simply impossible for me, a humanities professor, to pay for all the lyrics I’d wanted to cite in this book; thus, I’ve had to delete and either paraphrase or work around lyrics from artists whose rights are owned by more profit-oriented companies. This means I can’t treat their work with the same detail and rigor as I can ATR’s.

Introduction

1. Sweet Nothing

A number one hit in the UK and a top ten hit in the US, Calvin Harris’s Sweet Nothing seemed to catch on because it, like his 2011 hit with Rihanna, We Found Love, evoked the zeitgeist in a particularly apt and compelling way. Featuring vocals by Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine), it sets the story of a woman overcoming her emotionally and physically abusive relationship to Harris’s trademark EDM soars. The lyrics tell us of a woman who is exhausted, hollowed out to a shell of her former self; she’s running on fumes, living on, as the title says, nothing. Nothing is all she’s got, so Welch’s character has to figure out some way to capitalize on it. Welch’s character doesn’t just dialectically turning nothing into something (as in the first few sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic), she resiliently recycles nothing into the fuel she needs for living.

Instead of becoming some thing, nothing fuels a metabolic process, an explosive reaction that generates energy and momentum. The song’s lyrics depict Welch’s character as she undergoes this process. More interestingly, its musical composition performs the process the lyrics merely describe. If we listen closely to the song and how it works, we can hear how this metabolic process distills energy from nothing. In the same way that Welch’s character has found the sweet spot at which nothing alchemically transforms into life force, the song, as I will explain more fully below, is composed so that nothing intensifies and augments sonic and affective energies. This is a song, not so much about nothing as made of and with nothing.

The first big musical climax—the soar, to use a term popularized by Dan Barrow—arrives at the end of the first chorus.¹ As I will explain in more depth in the first chapter, the soar works by building rhythmic and often also timbral intensity up to a climax; this tension is then released with a hit on the downbeat of the next measure. In the first soar, the repetition of the phrase sweet nothing initiates the soar. Dividing the song’s phrases into shorter, more closely-spaced events, this repetition prepares us for the soar’s main thrust, which happens in the last eight beats of the chorus’s first half as Welch sings the song’s titular phrase, sweet nothing. Here, the snare goes from a 16th-note ostinato to a roll, which it holds for 7 beats as the bass drops out, and the pitch of a windy, swoosh-like synth ascends as its timbre sounds more constrained. The song is closing in on the upper limits of ability to hear speed and pitch—that is, the point at which we would hear nothing. The song builds its climax out of nothing—both literally, with the word itself, and metaphorically, by blowing our ears. On the 7th beat, the soar peaks; the snare roll spills over, on the eighth beat, into a less intense two-sixteenth-eighth-note motive that echoes the rhythm of the song’s main treble synth, and which replaces Florence’s vocals as the primary melodic voice in the second half of the chorus. We land relatively hard on the downbeat of the bridge. The soar-hit structure works like a weak harmonic cadence in a more traditional, tonal song. Instead of resolving dissonance, Sweet Nothing’s soar-hit compresses nothing so intensely it explodes into an energetic burst—here, the bubbly, energetic bridge. Nothing isn’t resolved into some thing, but metabolized into the energy that fuels an explosive climax of musical pleasure.

But this soar, and its repetition later in the song, aren’t’ the song’s main climax; they’re just intermediary steps up to it. This climax happens at the end of the chorus’s first repetition, about ⅔ of the way through the song. Here, the percussion and bass initially drop out, bringing us down to our lowest low so the subsequent high will seem all the more intense. Welch sings over string synths for four bars, at which point the soar begins. The instrumentals are basically the same as in the choruses, but her vocals intensify the affective energy of this soar by, perhaps paradoxically, cutting their rate of repetition. Instead of repeating nothing more rapidly, Welch sings it only twice, holding it for several bars, once as the soar builds, and then, significantly, right at the peak of the soar and on into the bubbly, dancy section. For added oomph, this bubbly section is repeated with the addition of vocals. The vocals, however, say nothing; Welch utters either unintelligible syllabifications (she’s not saying anything) or the phrase sweet nothing (nothing is the thing she’s saying). The song builds itself out of nothing, intensifying both literal and figurative nothingness into musical and affective energy.

Diplo and Grandtheft use a similar strategy in their remix of Harris and Welch’s original. The original’s accompaniment is cut and replaced with some trapstep percussion. The very rapidly repeating hi-hat 808s echo the percussion in the very peak of the original’s soars. What was once excess is now a baseline norm. If you’re already maxed out from the beginning, it seems like there’s no room left to build a soar. How, then, do you make the song more intense? You do this by actually crossing over into the sonic nothing that Harris’s soar only suggests. Harris’s soar maxes out by pushing up against the threshold of our rhythmic perception. The only way to squeeze more out of it was to cross this threshold into noise and/or silence. And that’s what Diplo and Grandtheft do. They takes Harris’s soar, extend it by four measures, and instead of spilling over into a peak, drop the bottom out (In Chapter 1 I talk more extensively about this technique, common in dubstep and trapstep, which I call a pause-drop). In the last measure of the first half of the chorus, the remix cuts all instrumentals and inserts a male-sounding voice in place of Welch’s natural voice. This male voice says sweet, but doesn’t complete the titular hook; instead of saying nothing, he doesn’t say anything. If the original soars up to a bubbly plateau, this remix falls of cliff, landing hard on the downbeat of the next measure. Eviscerating and hollowing out the soar only makes it more powerful—sort of like how Obi-Wan Kenobi warns Darth Vader If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.² The remix had to sweeten the musical pleasure of the original, and because Harris’s mix already hit the sweet spot (it was already maxed out), the only way Diplo could further sweeten that sweet spot is to pass over into nothing, into a dubby-pause-drop.

Sweet Nothing was a very popular song. This concept of sweet nothing—both as an abstract idea, and as a process you undergo (as either Florence’s character in the song, or someone listening to the song unfold)—must strongly resonate with audiences across the globe. But why? Why does this song—this story, this style of composition—seem to really speak to people now, in this sociohistorical moment? Why do people find nothing so sweet? What’s aesthetically pleasing about the process of metabolizing energy from nothing?

Sweeting nothing is more than just a neat musical gimmick or a bittersweet story. Sweet Nothing’s narrative and its musical composition are examples of resilience discourse. Resilience is neoliberalism’s upgrade on modernist notions of coherence and deconstruction—the underlying value or ideal that determines how we organize artworks, political and social institutions, the economy, concepts of selfhood, and so on. Resilience is the hegemonic or common sense ideology that everything is to be measured, not by its overall systematicity (coherence) or its critical, revolutionary potential (deconstruction), but by its health. This health is maintained by bouncing back from injury and crisis in a way that capitalizes on deficits so that you end up ahead of where you initially started (one step back, two steps forward) (Neocleous). If resilience is the new means of production, this means that crisis and trauma are actually necessary, desirable phenomena—you can’t bounce back without first falling. When you can’t expand your market any further because you’re already globalized, the only way to increase profits is by intensifying your current processes, recycling waste into resources (Naomi Klein calls this disaster capitalism, David Harvey calls this "neoliberalism as creative destruction). In fact, resilience discourse often treats crisis and injury as the only ways of getting ahead. So, for example, investors bet against stocks, turning what is traditionally a loss (poor performance) into a net win. Sweet Nothing exemplifies resilience, both musically, in its transformation of nothing into surplus aesthetic value, and narratively, in Welch’s performance in the video. People find musical gestures like EDM soars pleasurable because they perform the resilience we seek to embody. ³

The video fleshes out the story told in the lyrics. Welch plays a singer in a hostess club; she (intentionally or unintentionally, this isn’t clear) convinces Harris, a club patron, to hire someone to beat up her abusive boyfriend. As of this writing, the song’s Wikipedia entry interprets the video as the story of a woman pouring the pain and frustration of her unfulfilled life and abusive relationship into every revealing and explosive performance. This explosive performance happens at two levels: first, there’s the on-stage performance-within-a-performance of the song; second, there’s her overcoming of her victimization by her partner. She fights back, both by verbally confronting him, and by having him beat up. The epitome of resilience, Welch’s character takes her personal damage and transforms it into aesthetic surplus value for others, both within the video and beyond the fourth wall, to consume. Our pleasure isn’t just in her character’s musical performance in the club, but in her bouncing back from domestic abuse.

Even though Welch’s character fights back against a man, she’s still the victim of the Man, of patriarchy. As the video cuts back and forth between scenes of Welch’s character’s onstage breakdown and her partner’s alley beatdown, it depicts them in parallel positions. Both are shown thrashing about on the ground, pushed up against walls, and throwing things (punches in his case, props in hers). Cutting directly from a shot of her partner’s assailant stomping or kicking his victim to a shot of Welch’s character writhing in pain on the stage floor, the video makes it seem like she’s the one being beaten up. So, instead of reversing the dynamics of her abusive relationship, making her male partner the victim of male violence, this visual resonance suggests that Welch’s character is still the victim of patriarchal violence. Her change in wardrobe reinforces this point. Unlike the waitresses, who were wearing lingerie, Welch was fully clothed in a suit and tie. However, by the song’s main soar, she has stripped down to her bra. Now she is more intensely sexualized than the waitresses, because her spectacular performance places her as the object of everyone’s gaze; in comparison, the waitresses, as scantily clad as they are, seem mundane. Her resilience doesn’t fight back against patriarchy, but feeds it.

2. Resilience

Sweet Nothing is a quintessential example of both postmillennial EDM-pop music and neoliberal ideology because it shows how the two are intertwined. Its compositional structure, its lyrical content, its video, and even this Diplo remix all turn damage and deficit into surplus value. The songs incite damage for the purpose of recycling it. Noise isn’t disruptive or critical, but a resource or raw material. Noisemaking is the means of musical, cultural, and social production. This economy of noisemaking is what I call resilience discourse. Connecting the political economy of resilience to more abstract musical structures, Sweet Nothing encapsulates the main argument I make in this book: Resilience discourse is what ties contemporary pop music aesthetics to neoliberal capitalism and racism/sexism.

But what do I mean by resilience? I am using the term in a theoretically and historically specific way to refer to a distinctively neoliberal ethical and aesthetic ideal. Neoliberalism upgrades systems designed to secure against, conquer, or otherwise cover (to use James Snead’s term) damage; the point of the upgrade is to make these systems more efficient means of social and economic management. Instead of expending resources to avoid damage, resilience discourse recycles damage into more resources. Resilience discourse thus follows a very specific logic: first, damage is incited and made manifest; second, that damage is spectacularly overcome, and that overcoming is broadcast and/or shared, so that; third, the person who has overcome is rewarded with increased human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense, because: finally, and most importantly, this individual’s own resilience boosts society’s resilience. The work this individual does to overcome their own damage generates surplus value for hegemonic institutions—this is what distinguishes resilience in the narrow sense from other forms of recovery or therapy.

For example, contemporary pop music normalizes and mainstreams the noisy sonic damage of modernity’s avantgardes. As I will argue in chapter one, the pop charts are full of sounds—like glitches, rapid and jarring cuts, overdriven synths, etc.—that, just a few decades ago, were relegated to hip hop, industrial and avant-garde art music. The corporate music industry now profits from subcultural sounds and aesthetics that used to evade and challenge it—what used to kill it now makes it stronger, as Nietzsche would say. Contemporary race/gender/sexuality politics are similarly upgraded. As I will argue in chapter three, resilience discourse normalizes the sexist, racist damage traditional white supremacist patriarchy inflicts on white women and people of color as the ultimately innocuous damage that they are individually responsible for overcoming. This transforms traditional feminist and anti-racist methods of resisting oppression into techniques for reinforcing and augmenting the very oppressive institutions these methods were originally designed to resist. In both cases, noise is recycled into signal, and that signal boosts the overall health of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (to borrow bell hooks’ phrase).⁴

3. Biopolitics

Resilience is a technique for investing in life—life as human capital, or as a measure of individual and/or population-wide health and success. Thus, a theory of biopolitics, or what Michel Foucault calls the power over life (HSv1 135), is key to understanding resilience, both in itself and as a hinge between neoliberal ideology and music aesthetics.

Biopolitics is a trendy concept that gets used in a lot of ways and that can mean any number of things. My understanding of biopolitics draws primarily on Michel Foucault’s version (rather than, say, Giorgio Agamben’s), mainly because I find it the most productive account of biopolitics for thinking about music.⁵ For Foucault, biopolitics is both an ideology of vitality, health, and sustainable flourishing,